I haven't been working on any projects lately; and I'm kind of wondering what I should do next. I've put some effort into trying to figure out why my Hanzi Quiz program is hosed in Safari (and Konqueror): that's led me to submit a couple of bugreports.

The second of those reports is so whack that I wonder if something must just be wrong with my system: I first discovered that some accented characters don't show up in utf-8 encoding (although chinese chars are fine), and then I tried iso-8859-1 ... and accented characters didn't appear then either!

I thought that had to be a mistake, so I went and found the link to the famous French newspaper Le Monde, and that showed accented characters just fine. But when I viewed the html source, I found that all the accented characters were numeric entities! Do you Europeans never use the actual iso-8859-1 byte values (or utf-8 byte sequences) for your accented characters?

It strikes me as near impossible that Konqueror, as a European project, would fail to catch this -- but that's what's happening on my (Debian unstable) system.

In any case, Konq (and therefore Safari) look so hopelessly hosed to me that I'm not too inclined to try to make any serious DHTML work on for them. I think I should find another project for a while.

On a personal note, my wife and I are expecting a son in late October. That's an exciting prospect, but also somewhat scary.